Voter Fraud Scam Fails in Milwaukee Test
Market

This article
describes the coordinated effort on the part of the
Republican Party to establish alleged voterfraudcommitted by Democrats as a serious
problem. Despite the disruptions it caused, an evaluation
of the evidence shows the effort failed on multiple levels.
Yet the effort perseveres and the myth that voter fraud is
rampant is promoted even today by Republican operatives and
others who should know better.

The latest version of the
voter fraud myth had its origins Milwaukee before, during
and after 2004 presidential election. The Republicans
rolled out voter fraud as a crime of epidemic proportions;
test marketed that concept with a vigorous press campaign;
and encouraged a law enforcement effort to catch the
hypothesized vote cheaters. This effort is well documented.

Based on prior experience, the news of impending
investigations and arrests would be expected to suppress the
minority vote. The Milwaukee effort, combined with others,
offered to (a) strengthen the voter fraud myth as a vehicle
to restrict voting by minorities and (b) provide inoculation
should the Democrats or anyone else claim massive election
fraud in Ohio or other key battleground states.

The
Myth of Voter Fraud – Opening in Milwaukee

The
Milwaukee scheme relies on the largely invented phenomenon
called voter fraud that occurs an average of 8 times
a year (2002-2005 data). Think of that city as
a test market for the nextnew thing in the
Republican bag of tricks. Voter fraud charges weren’t
new, but systematic packaging represented a new level of
sophistication for voter suppression. The strategy was two
pronged. First establish the brand identity, then let the
legal system establish brand credibility (i.e., pervasive
voter fraud is epidemic) through massive prosecutions.

Branding (brand identification) began with the
widely heard and read Wall Street Journal’s John
Fund. Fund published his book Stealing
Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our
Democracy just six weeks before the 2004 election and promoted the book with wide
exposure, thanks to the cable news talking heads. Then we
got the local media onslaught.

Here is a sampling of the
story of Milwaukee 2004 put together by the Republican Party
of Wisconsin published by TPMMuckraker.Com. These headlines
represent the core narrative for the marketing campaign
offered to substantiate the alleged problem presented by
voter fraud in Wisconsin. There’s just one problem.
Despite all the law enforcement effort, only five
convictions resulted. Nevertheless, the effort is ongoing.

The press summary below is
part of a memo found its way into Karl Rove’s
office and may have been part of the rationale he offered
when he encouraged the National Republican Lawyers
Association to keep the heat on “ballot integrity”
issues.

The Republicans
would make a voter fraud charge, the media would cover it,
and then the coverage was used as evidence of impending vote
fraud. All the while, the most vulnerable voters in
Milwaukee, minority voters targeted in the articles, were in
a position to question what might happen on Election Day
were they to be challenged or otherwise investigated. At
the same time, the mainstream media coverage served to
promote the myth of corrupt urban (read minority) Democratic
machine control and manipulation of elections.

There’s
no need for a back room conspiracy between the Wisconsin
Republicans and the press. This insidious strategy was made
possible by the notion of equal
coverage without critical review. Thus, these
articles in the mainstream media might just as well have
been Republican press releases. They served that function
well, as indicated by the sampling above and the entire body
of releases in the original document. Very few of these
charges have been substantiated despite the combined efforts
of FBI, the U.S. Attorney, and the cooperative local
District Attorney.

All the Wisconsin Republicans had to
do was make a charge, no matter how unfounded, and that
charge entered the public dialogue as part of the political
mix with built in credibility provided by the coverage.
After all, there’re always two sides to every story
as in this case the great lie goes.

As if on cue, a task
force consisting of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI,
and local law enforcement began investigating the alleged
crime wave of voter fraud infecting Milwaukee. The U.S.
Attorney didn’t find much until reported complaints about
his performance reached him.

The pre election Republican
charges and resulting press coverage had a message: the
Democrats were going to cheat and cheat big in
Wisconsin’s largest urban (read largely minority) area.
Thosepeople would come out to vote multiple
times or vote without proper credentials. The message was
clear: The Democrats and their minority base are up to
no good. Vote Republican! The Nixon southernstrategy moved north.

Voter intimidation was a
central theme. Make baseless demands
for voter identification (e.g., “GOP Demands IDs of 37,000
in City”). Spread fear of prosecution for any errors in
registration or other voting laws (e.g., "If you've already
voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the
presidential election” from the nonexistent Black Voters
League). Conduct and promote high-visibility law
enforcement campaigns (e.g., “40
assistant district attorneys in the field on Election
Day”) for purely political purposes against a problem the
enforcers knew was trivial.

This is not new. In
1982 the Republican Party signed a consent decree to stop
promoting voter fraud efforts that targeted specific ethnic
groups (No. 81-3876. D.N.J. Nov. 1, 1982, see page
55). This finding was upheld in 1987(page 3) and again in 2004 by
federal courts. That suit was renewed in 2004 due to a
repetition of the behavior. This is called the politics of
Jim
Crow and is a direct descendent of the voter
suppression efforts begun against black citizens right after
Reconstruction ended in 1877.

The Results – Less than
Spectacular

The results were less than spectacular.
In fact, they represented an abject failure. A brutal
summary appeared in the Milwaukee
JSOnline (Journal Sentinel). Columnist
Daniel Bice laid it out on 11 April,
2007:

In all, federal prosecutors
indicted 14 individuals for either being a felon on
probation or parole who voted in November 2004 or for voting
twice in that contest. All but one of those charged with
felonies were African-American, and all were Milwaukee
residents.

Were those who generated
the flurry of press releases so myopic that they missed the
mark on the size of the crime wave? What a gap: the 37,000
Milwaukee voters who better have those ID’s
compared to the five individuals convicted of voter fraud.
Another gap: 5500 voters who had phantomaddresses and the 14 charged voter fraud with only 5
convicted nationwide despite a coordinated law enforcement
all over the case. The efforts to frighten minority
voters away from the polls and knowingly push baseless
charges were a key part of that effort.

The voters were
not fooled. The voter suppression strategy failed as
miserably as the prosecutions. Turnout was up 13% from 2000
to 2004. Kerry’s victory margin was 4% higher than
Gore’s and he won the City of Milwaukee by over 120,000
votes. Kerry was 12 points above his national average of
60% for big cities. Bush was 12 points off of his national
big city average of 39%. The people of Milwaukee spoke
clearly.

Did Bush and the White House Commit Election
Fraud, an Impeachable Offense?

Daniel
Bice established the connection between the Milwaukee
marketing campaign and the White House, specifically, Karl
Rove:

That document, entitled "Fraud in
Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary," turned up last week in
the horde of White House and U.S. Justice Departmentrecords released by the House Judiciary Committee, which
is investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"The
report was prepared for Karl Rove," said a source
with knowledge of the situation. "Rick wanted it so he could
give it to Karl Rove."

Yeah, that Karl Rove,
President Bush's political mastermind and his deputy
chief of staff.

The connection between
this voter fraud program and the president is crystal clear
from the Rove connection. In addition, the Republican Party
is explicitly linked to these efforts through the
“Timeline/Summary” and the Republican
National Lawyers Association (RNLA) (pages 43-47). In
April 2006, a meeting of the RNLA featured Rove
who thanked the lawyers for all they were doing to protect
“ballot integrity” and urged more
action. He must have known that 25
Department of Justice attorneys belonged to RNLA. Rove
could simply trot over to Justice and hit the water
cooler.

If you’re a candidate looking for help with
voter fraud, you need go no further than the NLRA web
site which had this information: “Their names
appeared on the organization's Web site under the heading
Find a Republican Lawyer, in many cases along with
their federal government e-mail addresses and work telephone
numbers.” If you’re a Republican candidate and you want
a voting rights specialist, you’ve got it made.

WASHINGTON - In his day job, Christian
Adams writes legal briefs for the voting rights section of
the Justice Department, a job that requires a nonpartisan
approach.

Off the clock, Adams belongs to the Republican
National Lawyers Association, a group that trains hundreds
of Republican lawyers to monitor elections and pushes for
confirmation of conservative nominees for federal
judgeships. 11 April 2007

One
tie in to the Milwaukee campaign is through the Wisconsin
Republican Party and RNLA state director, who supported the
removal of 5600 Wisconsin voters from the registration
rolls: “Donald Daugherty, the attorney
for the Republicans, noted that if any valid voters are
removed from the list, they can simply reregister on the
spot on Election Day.”

There is a strong argument that
the White House and the Republicans who ran the Milwaukee
marketing campaign are guilty of election fraud. Look at
the definition of election fraud from a recent study by
Minnite, PhD, Barnard College, Columbia University: “All
other forms of corruption of the electoral process [besides
voter fraud] and corruption committed by elected or election
officials, candidates, party organizations, advocacy groups
or campaign workers fall under the wider definition of election
fraud.”

Retail fraud involves voting multiple
times, excess ballots marked, and other small
voting-inflation techniques that produce a small number of
improper votes. Wholesale fraud involves manipulation of
voting equipment, tabulation and voting to steal tens of
thousands of votes.

By pursuing a
strategy of promoting voter fraud as a wide spread
phenomenon, the authors and supporters of this scheme were
trying to influence the votes of tens of thousands of
Wisconsin citizens exposed to this effort. This is
certainly a corruption of the election process any
way you look at it. It is reasonable
to assume that many, if not all of those involved knew
that intentional voter fraud was very infrequent.

The
participants were committing wholesale election fraud in the
process of promoting the myth of voter
fraud.

Previous “Scoop” coverage of the voter
fraud scandal and the U.S.
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